Craft Magazine

Advertisement

“I have worked with wood for thirty years. The bamboo bell is the one piece I do not finish — the wind finishes it.” Why a 63-year-old woodworker is selling her last hand-tuned wind chimes before her hands retire her craft.

Asheville, North Carolina — by Claire Holden, Contributing Editor

June Calloway at the workbench on the covered porch where she has shaped bamboo bells for the last seven years.

Four miles east of downtown Asheville, where the old Swannanoa road bends up into the ridge, there is a covered porch attached to the side of a wooden house. June Calloway is 63. She has been a woodworker on that porch since 1993 — bowls, cutting boards, garden ornaments, small carved pieces for local shops. For the last seven years, only bamboo bells.

She does not sell them as wind chimes. She is careful about that distinction. Wind chimes, she says, are the metal things that clatter on every other porch in America. What she makes is closer to an instrument — one that nobody plays, because the wind already knows how.

There is a final batch at the workbench. After that, she is done.

The Tube She Left on the Railing

In the summer of 2018, June was finishing a set of bamboo garden lanterns for a customer in Black Mountain. She had a leftover tube — too short for a lantern, too long to throw away. She had hollowed it, cleaned it, sanded the rim smooth, and set it upright on the porch railing to dry overnight. She forgot about it.

The next morning, early, before the coffee had finished, she was standing at the kitchen window when she heard something she could not place. A low, warm note, coming from somewhere on the porch. Not a bird. Not the house settling. A sound with weight to it — the kind that stays in the air after the thing that made it has stopped.

She walked out to the porch. The wind off the ridge had found the open bamboo tube on the railing. It had played it — one note, deep and clear — and then gone quiet and done it again.

The workbench where June shapes and tunes every bell by hand — bamboo tubes sorted by thickness and grain.

She spent the rest of that summer trying to get the sound right on purpose. Most of them were flat, or thin, or sounded like exactly what they were — a piece of bamboo being hit. The fourteenth one was different. She hung it from a hook at the edge of the porch, and by the afternoon a breeze had come down the ridge and played it without being asked. One note. Deep and warm. The kind of sound that makes you stop what you are doing and listen to what comes after it.

By the following spring, the workshop made nothing else.

What It Sounds Like When the Wind Finds It

The first thing people say is that it does not sound like a wind chime. No jangle. No clatter. It is a single, low, bell-like tone — closer to a temple bell heard from the next valley than to anything you have heard on a porch. The note rises, holds, and fades so slowly that the silence after it feels like part of the sound. In a light breeze, you hear it once every few minutes. In a steady wind, a handful of notes, each one arriving on its own, never crowding the one before.

Late afternoon on the porch. The bell hangs from the same hook where June first tested it seven years ago.

What People Write Her

There is a drawer in the workbench that June does not use for tools. It is full of letters — cards, folded notes, the occasional photograph. When I asked to see a few, she opened it and laid three on the bench.

The drawer in June’s workbench. She opens it on the days the tuning is not going well.

The first was from a woman named Diane in Savannah. Her husband had died in January. She hung the bell from the beam of the screened porch where they used to sit together. She wrote that the first time the wind played it, she did not think of anything. She just breathed.

The second was from a man named Thomas in Chicago. He had hung his bell from the bedroom window frame. He wrote that he had spent years trying apps and white-noise machines to quiet his head after work. The bell did what none of them could — not because it was louder than his thoughts, but because it was slower. His wife told him he had become a different person in the evenings.

The third was a short card from a woman named Ruth in Knoxville. She had bought two — one for herself and one for her mother, who lives alone outside Gatlinburg. The card had one sentence, underlined:

June slid the three letters back into the drawer and pushed it closed. “I make a thing out of bamboo,” she said. “And somehow it ends up doing the one job I never designed it for.”

What Sets These Apart

Each bell is a single tube of natural bamboo, a hand-fitted striker, and a wooden pendant that catches the wind.

There are hundreds of bamboo chimes on Amazon for eight or twelve dollars. Most of them sound like what they cost. June is careful to explain what makes hers different, because she knows the comparison is coming.

• 1.

  One Deep Note, Not a Jangle

  Each bell produces a single, resonant tone — low and warm, with a long natural decay. No clattering, no bright metallic ping, no noise. The kind of sound that calms a room instead of filling it. People who have heard both a cheap metal chime and one of June’s bells describe it as the difference between a car alarm and a church bell in the distance.

• 2.

  Tuned to 432 Hz

  Every bell is tuned in the 432 Hz scale — eight cycles per second below the modern concert standard. It is the tuning that Tibetan singing-bowl makers and Japanese temple-bell craftsmen have worked with for centuries. The difference is subtle. Most people cannot name it. Most people notice it in their chest before they notice it in their ears.

• 3.

  The Bamboo Is Chosen by Ear

  June selects every tube by knocking on it. Grain density, wall thickness, and natural moisture determine how a piece of bamboo resonates. Two tubes cut from the same stalk can sound entirely different. The ones that ring clean go to the bench. The rest become garden stakes. A machine cannot make this decision because a machine does not listen.

• 4.

  The Flea-Market Tuning Fork

  Before a bell leaves the workbench, June strikes it alongside an old 432 Hz tuning fork she found at a flea market in Black Mountain in 2019. If the bell does not ring clean against the fork, it stays on the bench. The fork is older than she is. She trusts it more than any digital tuner she has tried, and she has tried several.

• 5.

  A Handwritten Note in Every Pouch

  Each bell ships in a cloth pouch with a folded note inside. One sentence, written by June that morning, chosen for that bell. She does not plan them. She does not repeat them. She sits with the finished bell at the bench, listens to it once, and writes whatever the sound puts in her head.

• 6.

  Four Tunings, Four Moods

  Each bell is tuned to one of four chords. D is warm and open — the one that sounds like a morning on the porch. Am is deeper and stiller — the tone people choose when the bell is meant to remember someone. C is clear and calm — the one most people say drops their shoulders the fastest. G is bright and fresh — the garden tone. June does not tell people which to pick. She says you hear the four and you know.

Why She Is Stopping

June turned 63 in March. The work has always been physical — cutting, filing, sanding, holding a tube steady while she taps it and listens for pitch. Over the last year, the steadiness has started to leave her hands. The filing that determines the note — the part that separates a bell that rings from a tube that thuds — requires a precision she can no longer count on every morning.

The 432 Hz tuning fork from the Black Mountain flea market. Every bell must pass it before it ships.

This last batch is every bell she has left in her. She tuned each one herself, checked each one against the fork, and wrote each note by hand. A comparable hand-tuned bamboo instrument from the European makers she admires runs well over a hundred dollars. June is not trying to match their prices. She is trying to get these bells onto porches, into gardens, and next to open windows — the places where the wind can find them.

What They Wrote June After Their First Wind

Three Honest Questions Before You Order

Where do I hang it — and will the bamboo last?

Anywhere the wind can reach it. A porch hook, a tree branch, a balcony rail, a window frame. The bamboo is finished and treated for outdoor life on a sheltered porch or under an eave — where most people hang it. June’s own has lived on the same porch hook for seven years through Carolina summers and mountain winters. For fully open, unsheltered spots she recommends bringing it in during storms and giving it a light wipe once in a while. It is natural bamboo. It weathers. It develops character. And it keeps its tone.

Is it going to bother the neighbors?

The opposite. It is a single, low, soft note — the kind you hear from your own porch and nobody hears from theirs. It is not a jangly metal rattle. People in apartments and HOA neighborhoods buy it specifically because it is the one chime that will not start a conversation with the people next door.

What if it is not for me?

Thirty days to return for a full refund, no questions. A quick email to the support team and it is handled.